Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira

ABSTRACT: This article seeks to examine to what extent Kierkegaard’s moral philosophy draws on Kant’s critique of dialectical reason. It is shown that Kant’s refutation of the ontological proof of God means a departure from objective uncertainty towards practical certainty, while Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence allows for truth to be regarded as being both personal and objective. Whether Kierkegaard’s conception of existence cannot be separated from the Absolute Paradox or whether it does not at all presuppose God’s revelation seems to guide a pre-understanding of the Lutheran-inspired opposition between faith and reason which haunts both Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s view of human nature vis à vis the Wholly Other.

KEY WORDS: dialectic, ethics, existence, faith and reason, metaphysics, objectivity, philosophical anthropology, religion, subjectivity.

RESUMO: Este artigo procura examinar em que medida a filosofia moral de Kierkegaard se apóia na crítica kantiana da razão dialética. Mostra-se que a rejeição kantiana da prova ontológica da existência de Deus significa um afastamento da incerteza objetiva em direção à certeza prática, enquanto a dialética kierkegaardiana da existência permite que a verdade seja tomada como sendo tanto pessoal quanto objetiva. Se a concepção kierkegaardiana de existência não pode ser separada do Paradoxo Absoluto ou se nem sequer pressupõe a revelação divina parece guiar uma pré-compreensão da oposição luterana entre fé e razão que persiste nas concepções de natureza humana em Kant e Kierkegaard, com relação ao Todo-Outro.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: antropologia filosófica, dialética, ética, existência, fé e razão, metafísica, objetividade, religião, subjetividade.

Like Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard has definitely contributed to the vast field of philosophy of religion with a seminal conception of what means to believe in God, and in particular with a highly original interpretation of Christianity and Christian theology. Unlike Kant, however, Kierkegaard does propose an account of what a genuine Christian faith should be like, beyond a culturally-reducible Christendom comprising most people that claim to be Christian: not so much a question of being a Christian, but rather of becoming one. Like Kant, Kierkegaard draws a distinction between what means to exist and how our human existence may be said to relate to God’s. In contrast with Kant’s, though, Kierkegaard’s critique of religion cannot be separated from his literary style and his own existential thought-experiments with writing. If Kant’s greatness in philosophy is inevitably bound to the formal, systematic rigor of his three Critiques, Kierkegaard’s original contribution to what has become known as existentialism and post-modern thought cannot do away with its religious roots. While existence and religion play an important role in Kant’s philosophy, they cannot be said to constitute the very kernal of thinking the meaning of being and reality overall as it is the case with Kierkegaard’s dialectic. Just as German idealism must always refer -- directly or indirectly-- to Kant’s transcendental analytic, one cannot reconstitute or recast an existentialist approach to reality without alluding somehow to Kierkegaard’s dialectic. Both Kant and Kierkegaard may correctly be regarded as belonging to a transcendental idealist tradition according to which one cannot simply start from empirical data as though reality were "out there," given once and for all to be discovered, known, and acted upon by independent minds and bodies. And yet, it is my contention here that, for Kierkegaard, such an "anti-realism" not only points to the epistemic structure of a transcendental subjectivity as a starting-point, following Kant’s critique of rationalism and empiricism, but also undermines its validity claims insofar as subjectivity qua existence cannot be fully, rationally conceived of in self-referential terms, i.e. its self-referentiality solicits the other of reason. Kierkegaard resorts thus to existence precisely in order to transcend a supposedly immanentist conceptual analysis, so as to implode philosophical undertakings as such. Hence Kierkegaard’s approach to the problem of existence begins with the Kantian assumption that human finitude cannot ask reason to account for a realm that is not causally conditioned in time and space. Just as Kant’s dialectic shows the impossibility of proving that there is a God, reason can still conceive of the unconditioned even without having knowledge of it: it is ultimately a question of shifting toward a use of reason which is other than the theoretical one. Kierkegaard’s dialectical, existential understanding of faith seems to converge on Kant’s critique of the dialectic of reason in theoretical terms, eliciting a practical idea whenever dealing with the traditional objects of metaphysics. Like Kant’s, Kierkegaard’s anti-realism rejects both naive realism (what some would call "external realism" nowadays) and psychological idealism ("subjectivism"). Unlike Kant, however, Kierkegaard vindicates a philosophical discourse, even in its peculiar negative, self-overcoming undertones, to think in grand style what cannot be thought, namely, the forbidden fruit of metaphysical desire, or, in Kantian terminology, a dialectic of the unknown. To quote from Kierkegaard’s Philosophiske Smuler:

Although I do not have any pretension to exploring here Kierkegaard’s and Kant’s complex philosophies of religion, I must signal that their respective accounts of dialectics and existence not only refer us to some of the main problems at issue (such as the nature of God, faith, and knowledge) but also translate the motifs and concerns of their philosophizing in general. To my mind, even though one cannot reduce the question of religion to any category such as sacrifice, the sacred, the other, the absolute ground of being, and so forth, one may well sustain --in reasonable, rational terms-- that there is no religion without God, gods or a sense, intuition or an idea of the divine --beyond both theistic and deistic variants. Moreover, by all accounts, most religions embrace what may be termed a realistic view of God’s existence --that God does exist is simply an unproblematic starting-point, even if such an assumption is not conceived in theistic or deistic terms. Both Kant and Kierkegaard agree on identifying the philosophical attitude with a critical problematizing of whatever seems to be given. While theology deals with mysteries and their confessional formulations, philosophy has to do with problems, the positing of problemata and their conceptual working. Philosophical theology must thus be understood, on the one hand, as a branch of metaphysics --to employ the terminology at vogue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--, more precisely, as a theoretical discipline. On the other hand, Kierkegaard draws on Kant’s practical shift in the critique of dogmatic metaphysics as they both provide us with an overcoming of theism and deism in their practical approach to the philosophical problem of God. In this sense, one may say that both Kant and Kierkegaard conceive of religion in practical-theoretical terms, that is, both as a philosophical-theological and as a practical-philosophical object of inquiry. Eckart Förster and Allen Wood have convincingly shown that Kant’s philosophy of religion and his conception of God have undergone many modifications from the 1770 Inaugural Dissertation through the three Critiques and the later writings on religion. There is, however, one thing that remains unchanged in Kant’s views on religion and faith, namely, that practical reason prevails over the failing attempts of dialectical reason to sustain a coherent theoretical proof for God’s existence. In the KrV (A 631ff., B 659 ff.), Kant shows the aporias of both natural-theistic and transcendental-deistic approaches to theology as they respectively represent the supreme being as cause and Author of the world. According to Kant, seeing that theism admits the deistic transcendental ontotheology plus a natural theology, all theistic proofs can be divided into three general types --ontological, cosmological, and physicotheological-- and that because the first one cannot be held, the other two are equally flawed (A 583ff., B 611ff.) The Kantian argument against the ontological proof of the existence of God (KrV A 592-602, B 620-630) is thus summed up: "‘Being’ is obviously not a real predicate, that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing... If, now, we take the subject (God) with all its predicates (among which is omnipotence), and say ‘God is,’ or ‘There is a God,’ we attach no new predicate to the concept of God..." Kant’s main contention is that one cannot theoretically justify her faith by arguing that there is a God or that Christianity (or any other religion) is true, but one can reasonably argue for a moral faith, making religion thus dependable on morality and substituting moral for rational theology. As we can read from his Lectures on Philosophical Theology:

If it was Kant indeed who introduced the terms Dialektik, Existenz, and Dasein in modern clothing it was also to him that, as Ronald Green’s meticulous study has shown, a "hidden debt" is owed by the Danish thinker. Besides Kierkegaard’s explicit usage of Kantian terms and conceptions, the former’s not at all unproblematic opposition to Hegel’s speculative idealism -- even if one concludes that such a critique must be extended to Kant himself -- reveals an indebtedness to the Königsberger’s moral conception of religion and his critique of dogmatic metaphysics. It has been my assumption here that Kierkegaard’s conception of the divine Eternal as over human existence indeed refers us back to Kant’s critique of dialectical reason, particularly in the refusal of the ontological proof for God’s existence. In this sense I tend to agree with Green that perhaps "the debt to Kant is hidden because Kierkegaard wanted it to be."(p. xviii) As over against Green’s thesis, others still prefer to follow Alasdair MacIntyre and place Kierkegaard’s ethics within the post-eudaimonistic, post-Aristotelian communitarianism of competing traditions. To be sure, the originality of Kierkegaard’s dialectic goes beyond Kant (and Hegel) as it lies in his theological-philosophical attempt to reinterpret Christianity as the ultimate response to the existential question, "How far does the Truth admit of being learned?" (PF 11) With this Platonic question -- which to a certain extent may also be said to guide Kant’s own recasting of the Socratic self-quest as "what can I know?" --, Kierkegaard has set Christianity over against both philosophical realism and idealism as it seeks to revisit previous conceptions of human nature and the possibility of knowledge. Like Kant’s later reformulation of the threefold questioning in the Transcendental Dialectic (in his Vorlesungen on Logic), any critique of knowledge will lead us back to the question of philosophical anthropology, "Was ist der Mensch?" Notwithstanding, Kierkegaard’s philosophy of man deals with the problem of transcendental subjectivity from a different standpoint, which turns out to be existential, marking then a dialectical shift from a transcendental-idealistic toward an existentialist anthropology. Whether Kierkegaard’s conception of existence cannot be separated from the Absolute Paradox or whether it does not at all presuppose God’s revelation seems to guide a pre-understanding of the Lutheran-inspired opposition between faith and reason which haunts both Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s view of human nature vis à vis the Wholly Other.

1. A Dialectical Existence

There is no doubt as to the existential-dialectical character of Søren Kierkegaard’s works, even though such an apparently obvious statement deserves a careful qualification, especially as one takes into account his radical opposition to the Hegelian conception of dialectics, contrasting with its original formulation, say, in Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato. In effect, the term "dialectic" appears several times throughout Kierkegaard’s publications and posthumously published writings. One of the main problems in studying the Kierkegaardian dialectic arises when one tries to articulate it with his correlative conception of philosophy and theology. For to what extent can one speak of a Kierkegaardian philosophy? How is one to reconstruct a theology which claims to be anti-systematic in its very dialectical structure? After all, is it possible, according to Kierkegaard, to do philosophy without presupposing some kind of religious commitment or theological foundation -- even on the groundless soil of faith which cannot be reduced to any form of philosophical discourse? These questions translate part of the problematic involved in studying the articulation of existence and dialectics in the work of the Danish "solitary individual," who lived out his own dialectical existence, not without its discrepancies and shortcomings, hoping however to suscitate an existential response from his readers. In a nutshell, one may assert that Kierkegaard’s dialectic is to be inevitably attached to his existential vocation as a writer. As he says in the Papirer (1843),

Although Kierkegaard often employs the term "dialectic" so as to relate his conception of human existence to his reflection upon Christianity, I agree with Jean-Denis Kraege in that "dialectic" in Kierkegaard’s literary production, is an ambiguous term, "un terme à géométrie variable, à usages multiples." In point of fact, this ambiguity is itself implicated in the Kierkegaardian problematic of articulating his conceptions of human existence and divine revelation on the same level of his dialectic. Thus Hermann Diem’s work on Kierkegaard’s Existenzdialektik concludes that the latter’s idea of human existence cannot be separated from that of an Absolute Paradox, whereas Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes suggest that Kierkegaard’s view of existence does not presuppose God’s revelation. Assuming that Kant’s critique of dialectics, and hence his Religionskritik, must not be confined to the KrV or even to the systematic problem of the transcendental deductions in his three Kritiken, Kierkegaard’s avoidance of the ontological proof for God’s existence not only follows upon (as Green and others have attempted to show) but radicalizes Kant’s insofar as the latter’s refutation of the proofs shifts away from objective uncertainty towards practical certainty, while Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence allows for truth to be regarded as being both personal and objective.

Pierre Mesnard had already suggested -- as early as 1960-- that one of the best epithets to characterize Kierkegaard’s life and work as a whole is that of "une existence dialectique." For Kierkegaard’s "dialectical existence" occupies in effect a unique place in the history of Western philosophy: contrary to most thinkers, Kierkegaard’s object of reflection is not outside but within one’s own subjective sphere of existence. Moreover, his "dialectical existence" is deliberately opposed to a Greek, immanentist conception of "existential dialectic." (CUP 274, 297) Certainly one can assert that the history of philosophy is grosso modo the history of the philosopher’s understanding of herself and her own world --and such was the greatness of Hegel’s reappropriation of Greek dialectic. However, insofar as he fails to think his own existence inwardly and inseparably from his own thought, the System ends up mistaking the existential moment for any other mediation towards completion and totalizing reconciliation. In Kierkegaard’s eloquent words,

If Kant’s Copernican revolution brought about the emergence of modern subjectivity (i.e., transcendentally conceived), Kierkegaard set out to understand subjectivity qua an existing individual, as he undertook the task par excellence of the subjective thinker in his endless quest of "understanding himself in his existence."(CUP 314) Since human existence must always be taken in its subjective finitude, it stands thus as over against its other, coram deo, the other of both thought and existence. As Kierkegaard put it so well: "God does not think, he creates; God does not exist, He is eternal. Man thinks and exists, and existence separates thought and being, holding them apart from one another in succession."(CUP 296) It has been a commonplace to assume that the subjective plays a determinant and decisive role in the Kierkegaardian thought and, as Jean Wahl and other scholars have shown, Kierkegaard ‘s religious fideism preserves some traits which remind us of Luther, Pascal and Hamman, on the one hand, and of his Romantic background on the other (Baader, Fichte, and Schelling). To some extent, one can also affirm that Kant anticipated Kierkegaard’s conception of faith as an "objective uncertainty," which places the believer upon the groundlessness, the "seven thousand fathoms" of water. According to Kant, God’s existence is not an objective judgment based on human knowledge but a subjective judgment, which provides the basis for our moral belief or faith:

Although he assigns practical rationality to his conception of faith, Kant’s morality remains a-historical: transcendental subjectivity implies a universal faith which lacks both the personal and the subjective elements of Kierkegaard’s view of faith. In effect, the Kierkegaardian project seeks to establish "truth" in an act of faith which claims to be both personal and objective: hence the dialectic of subjectivity arises from the very problematic constitution of human existence. Because human beings "exist in order to think sub specie aeterni" Kierkegaard set out to develop his dialectic of existence, as over against the Hegelian dialectic of the Geist, and inspired by the Socratic concept of irony:

This opposition between a Hegelian, idealistic dialectic and a Socratic-inspired, existential dialectic constitutes not only the historical starting point in Kierkegaard’s philosophical itinerary but also the kernel of his dialectical articulation between existence and eternity. For existence is inevitably to oppose human existence to the eternal or the very conception of God or the divine (the God, ho theos, in Danish, Guden). Hence, from an orthodox, fundamentalist standpoint, one may say that Kierkegaard distorted biblical revelation to fit his own preconceived theory of human existence, a theory developed independently of revelation. Nevertheless, within a hermeneutical framework, the very conception of revelation implies both a theological discourse (deus revelatus) and a certain "deconstruction" of whatever is taken to be the object revealed (deus absconditus), in that the God who reveals himself is a hidden God and hidden things belong to him.(FT 82-99; cf. Isaiah 48:6) I think thus that one fails to fairly appreciate the complex articulation of Kierkegaardian terms if one does not take into account the very dialectic which brings together theological and philosophical motifs in his Denkweg. This can be seen in the first sample of Kierkegaard’s opera dialectica, namely, his academic dissertation, The Concept of Irony, With Constant Reference to Socrates, orally defended in Latin, albeit written in the vernacular, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of Copenhagen in 1841. Even though this work has been dismissed by some interpreters as "a youthful effort without real significance for understanding Kierkegaard," today it is generally regarded, after Mesnard’s popularized aphorism, as an ironic essay on irony itself! The historical importance of this dissertation resides, before anything, in its Hegelian terminology and in its controversial interpretation of the Socratic irony. That year marks also Kierkegaard’s final rupture with his fiancée Regina Olsen (October 11th), and his first trip to Berlin, where he attended Schelling anti-Hegelian Vorlesungen at the local University. The first and the last theses of the oral defense, appended to Kierkegaard’s original essay, contained the themselves the ironic movement of his dialectical authorship:

1. Similitudo Christum inter et Socratem in dissimilitudine praecipue est posita. (The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in dissimilarity)...

1. Ut a dubitatione philosophia sic ab ironia vita digna, quae humana vocetur, incipit. (As philosophy begins with doubt, so also that life which may be called worthy of man begins with irony)

Of course the development of Kierkegaard’s concept of irony is much more complex than the explicit points defended in his dissertation: starting from a Hegelian perspective of totality, the "infinite absolute negativity," he moves however toward the original situation of reflection on the level of the contemplating subject, whose irony is but the beginning of subjectivity. In Hegelian terminology, one may say that, for Kierkegaard, the ideal significance of irony is to grasp its meaning as contradiction (ambiguity), its structure as dialectical, its medium the language of reflection, its style antithetical, and its aim self-discovery. In this "inverted" dialectic his essay on irony returns to the first thesis, applied to Kierkegaard’s position vis-à-vis Hegel’s dialectic, as the apparent similarity between them is posited in that dissimilarity. This ambiguous idea of dissimilitude is better understood in the Platonic usage of Socrates’ conceptions of irony and dialectic which inspires the entire Kierkegaardian critique of philosophy:

The polysemous usage of the term "Dialektik" in Kierkegaard’s writings seems to be inevitable if we take into account his irreconcilable opposition between the Hegelian and the Socratic dialectic. For Socrates, the object of philosophical reflection par excellence is the human existence, or as the Delphic oracle ran, "know thyself." Thus the dialectical relationship between the particular and the universal, the abstract and the concrete, is but an instrument, an organon in the service of the quantitative speculation of the individual upon his own, concrete existence. As one finds in some of Plato’s dialogues, the image of Socrates as a dialectician is that of an endless va-et-vien, a back and forth motion between opposed poles. As Paul Foulquié has defined it, "La pensée (socratique) est un va-et-vien incessant du particulier au général et du général au particulier, du concret à l’abstrait et de l’abstrait au concret." According to Socrates, the relationship between subject and object, between anthropos and t’agathon (in the sense of Summum Bonum), is based on a paradox, namely that one can know the Good only if one is already good, which implies one’ s having already made his choices and conducted his life as if he knew indeed the Good. This eudaemonistic morality implies, in Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socrates and Plato, that our human existence cannot be the object of philosophical reflection without entailing at the same time an ethical response on the part of the reflecting individual. Hence the Kierkegaardian conception of a "dialectic of communication." Insofar as Christianity is regarded from a higher, religious standpoint of existential self-positing for human life --vis à vis both aisthesis (sensibility) and ethos (morality)--that is precisely what distinguishes Christ from Socrates, in that the latter’s paradoxical relation to the Good does not presuppose the Summum Bonum as a paradox per se, whereas Christianity evolves out of the Paradox par excellence, namely that God became flesh in Jesus Christ yet remaining "the God," "the Eternal," and this is the paradoxical predicament of human existing before God, coram deo.(CUP 507)

While this existential dialectic remains open toward the paradoxical irruption of the eternal within our temporal becoming, Hegel’s Dialektik is essentially oriented towards the reconciliation (Versöhnung), namely the effective realization of opposed moments in history. To be sure, the key element to be denounced in Hegelian dialectic, according to Kierkegaard, is not the Paradox, but that the Aufhebung of what has been posited and its negation come full circle in Absolute Knowing. For Kierkegaard retains the double sense of "Aufhebung" (Danish, Ophaevelse, "abrogation") to mean at once a tollere and a conservare, an "abolishing" and an "Aufbewahren," a preservation of contraries.(CUP 199) Hegel’s dialectic takes place in a teleologically monistic world -- not to say "pantheistic" as Kierkegaard called it --, the System whose logic is the primary locus where the Absoluter Geist comes into expression. "Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig" -- the Hegelian identification between the Rational and the Effective-Real ends up sacrificing the individuality of the existential subject, on the very altar of Concrete Totality (das konkrete Allgemeine). In brief, the positive work of the negative, "the negation of the negation," which operates in the socially, linguistically mediated human spirit in the same logical way as in the totality of the Effective-Real (Wirklichkeit), reduces the freedom of the individual to an existential reflection of necessary mediation (Vermittlung), in a veritable pantheistic odyssey of the Absoluter Geist. Hegel and his dialectic constitute thus, according to Kierkegaard, the chief enemy of Christianity: "The idea of philosophy is mediation," wrote Kierkegaard in 1841, "-- Christianity’s is the paradox."

Although one may well argue for an atheistic or agnostic reading of Kant, his fideism is usually regarded as placing "faith above reason," which C. Stephen Evans instructively contrasts with Kierkegaard’s responsible fideism of going even further and positing "faith against reason": in either case, such a critique of natural and rational evidence must not be reduced to a sort of irrationalism. Kant’s famous assertion, in the second preface to KrV, that he "had to abolish (deny, uplift, aufheben) knowledge in order to make room for faith"(B xxx) points thus to the inevitability of "pure practical faith" in that the ethical agent’s conviction is "not logical but moral certainty ... I must not even say, ‘It is morally certain that there is a God, etc.,’ but ‘I am morally certain etc.’ "(KrV A 829, B 857) If no one can be commanded to believe in God’s existence, the pursuit of the highest good is objectively grounded in practical reason, hence as following the principle of universalizability of the moral law (or the categorical imperative). To the negative use of dialectic in theoretical reason, Kant opposes a positive conception of practical reason in the very principle of morality, autonomy, so that one’s subjective principle of action must be objectively held as a universal law.

Commenting on the Kierkegaardian project of "becoming subjective" in order to "become a Christian," Eduard Geismar has observed that although "Kierkegaard’s thought is through and through idealistic," as it ultimately takes "his point of departure from an ethical idealism, he nevertheless ends by presenting Christianity as the direct opposite of all human idealism." Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom is thus better understood as part of his anti-Hegelian programmatic critique of speculative idealism. In his first major book., Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, edited in 1843 under the pseudonym of Victor Eremita, Kierkegaard rhetorically and ironically theorizes over the aesthetic life (vol. I: "Diapsalmata," "Diary of the Seducer") and suggests the ethical choice ("to choose oneself" as an equivalent expression for the Socratic "gnothi seauton"; vol. II : "Aesthetic Validity of Marriage," "Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Composition of Personality"). Yet the title of the book, as Walter Lowrie remarks, is very revealing in that it intended to oppose not only the Hegelian "both-and" but Hegel’s dialectic of mediation on the whole. In the same year, two other pseudonymous works were published, Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio, and Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, by Constantine Constantius, both visibly written "for Regina" -- like all his pseudonymous works. In his Edifying Discourses (1843), Kierkegaard had already pointed to the paradoxical dependence of man upon God’s Truth, as truth pro me, the existing individual. The direct discourse of a sermon, however, was not as efficient as the indirect form of his writings. According to the Kierkegaardian dialectic of indirect communication, Truth is a living and personal existential reality, for God Himself is Subject, and his truth cannot be conveyed as a "doctrine" but as an "alternative" to be chosen, as a possibility to be realized. "Truth is subjectivity": Fear and Trembling, whose main theme is the "teleological suspension of the ethical" in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac moves in effect from the ethical into the religious sphere, in a passionate depiction of the reality of the individual’s existence coram deo. Here one finds the Kierkegaardian dialectical conception of faith as human self-consciousness of one’s existence before God, hence as "the paradox of existence"(FT 47):

The teleological suspension of the ethical consists in Abraham’s receiving, "by virtue of the absurd," Isaac back to him, in a veritable transvaluation of the ethical, "au-delà de l’universel," becoming thus a knight of faith (as opposed to the "knight of infinite resignation, "who renounces everything with no hope of ever getting it back). The anthropological project of this work reveals some of the religious traits which Kierkegaard assigns to the Christian conscious appropriation of faith. As David Swenson remarks, the chief categorical determinants assigned to faith and developed in the essay are:

1) the particularity of its relationship to God, dispensing with every form of universal intermediary -- community, state, humanity, tradition -- so that the individual sustains qua individual an absolute relation to the Absolute;

2) the infinite resignation with respect to finite goods which it psychologically presupposes, thus dissociating itself toto coelo from those dreams of wish-fulfillment with which the inexperienced confuse it;

3) the double movement of the spirit, by which after the infinite resignation it again lives in the finite, but only in virtue of a God-relationship which has no dependence upon calculations of the understanding;

4) the fearful teleological suspension of the ethical as exemplified in Abraham, whom the poetic imagination of the author makes to live vividly in the present.(PF xv-xliv)

Such a suspension of ethical consciousness corresponds, on a universal level, to the Christian consciousness of sin and its forgiveness by God, "au-delà de l’éthique." Johannes de Silentio cannot say anything to explain Abraham’s leap of faith, for the knight of faith goes beyond any conceivable mediation, the movement of faith stemming from the paradoxical opposition between God and man. Kierkegaard is refuting thus the Hegelian gospel of "anthropodicy," according to which man’s becoming is a historical manifestation of the kénose of the Spirit, in a dialectical theodicy of reconciliation between God and man. In Repetition, an experimental psychologist, Constantine Constantius, sets out to make a test of the category of "repetition," to find out for himself whether he can really experience a repetition of a previous satisfaction as those experienced in a first trip to a foreign town. Thus he decides to make a second visit to Berlin, in order to compare his different impressions and sensations from both visits, and to conclude whether or not he could secure a repetition of determined satisfactions. In brief, Constantine discovers that, from an aesthetic point of view, the second visit did not grant him a repetition of the satisfactions experienced on his first trip. On the other hand, he concludes that an ethical repetition is the very raison d’être for living and enjoying life. Yet this ethical repetition leads to something much deeper, namely the religious problem par excellence which consists in "the possibility of a reinstatement of the moral integrity of the personality after an experienced breach."(FT 132ff.) Now, Kierkegaard does not believe in the possibility of "a Job-like return to the happiness of the first immediacy." For the protagonist of the book, the "young man," Constantine’s friend, undergoes the disillusion and suffering of art impossible love affairs, and yet hopes like Job to receive everything double." Since the young man was unable to experience the "repetition in the world of actuality, he has to make use of the religious language of the poet, in a "consciousness raised to the second power," according to which he reappropriates the moral meaning of his existence."(FT 204ff.)

Kierkegaard’s aesthetic and ethical writings are but a propaedeutics to the religious consciousness of the Absolute Paradox, as expressed in the Christian faith. Thus, according to Kierkegaard, Christianity is no "solution" to the aesthetic and ethical aporias, in their inquiry into ultimate meaning for our human existence. Since Christianity is not to be understood as a "system of doctrine" but is rather an existential appropriation of truth by the individual in a leap of faith, one finds here again the dialectical relationship between Kierkegaard’s existential anthropology and his philosophy of revelation. This philosophical-theological category of the Paradox is largely discussed in his Philosophical Fragments, or A Fragment of Philosophy, by Johannes Climacus published by Kierkegaard in 1844. "The paradox," Kierkegaard writes in his Journals, "is not a concession but a category, an ontological definition which expresses the relation between an existing cognitive spirit and the eternal truth.(1834; PF 37) As I have already mentioned, the anthropological problem can be dealt with in function of the Socratic-Platonic search for the Truth of human existence. On the title page of the Fragments, one finds the intriguing question: "Is an historical point of departure possible for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure have any other than a merely historical interest; is it possible to base an eternal happiness upon historical knowledge?"

Starting from the assumption that the Socratic-Platonic "immanent " conception of truth "within ourselves" is not correct, Kierkegaard proposes in his "project of thought" that truth in this case would have to be brought to us from the "outside." Instead of the maieutic method of helping others to become conscious of themselves and bring to birth the truth which they already bore in themselves, Climacus proposes that we learn the truth from a teacher, one who possesses that which mankind does not know or possess. This Unknown, Kierkegaard calls it "the God" (Danish Guden, as opposed to Gud, without the article), after the Platonic usage of ho theos. "The Teacher," says Climacus, "is then, the God himself, who in acting as an occasion prompts the learner to recall that he is in Error (as opposed to and against the Truth), and that by reason of his own guilt."(PF 49f.) This state of "being in error by reason of one’s own guilt," Climacus calls it Sin. This wholly otherness of the God, the Unknown as such, was revealed to mankind in Jesus Christ, the God-man who came to liberate us from the Error and from hamartia, Sin: "And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free."(John 8:32) We recall that the Judaeo-Christian conception of personal truth, emeth, renders problematic our translations of aletheia and its rapprochements with the Jewish view of truth as trust and the Christian doctrine of revelational truth. Kierkegaard goes on to expose his gospel of the Absolute Paradox:

Like Kant, Kierkegaard recasts the problem of religion in moral terms, but only to exhaust the possibilities of attaining to the expectations set by this asymmetric relationship of human finiteness in the face of an absolute, infinite God:

The ethical is the universal and as such it is also the divine. Thus it is proper to say that every duty is a duty to God, but if no more can be said than this, then it is also said that I have no duty to God. The duty becomes duty by being traced back to God, but in the duty itself I do not enter into relation to God ... If in this connection I then say that it is my duty to love God, I am actually pronouncing only a tautology, inasmuch as ‘God’ in a totally abstract sense is here understood as the divine -- that is, the universal, that is duty. The whole existence of the human race rounds itself off as a perfect, self-contained sphere, and then the ethical is that which limits and fills at one and the same time. God comes to be an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought; his power is only in the ethical, which fills all existence.(FT 68)

Kierkegaard is dealing thus both with the problem of negative theology (comment ne pas parler--au sujet de Dieu en tant que Tout-Autre) and the challenge of rethinking and reintroducing the tragic in modern philosophy (existential subjectivity, both historically and socially constituted). The Kierkegaardian hero of faith, Abraham, can only believe and act "by virtue of the absurd."(FT 56) Kierkegaard draws a distinction between the paradoxical faith by virtue of the absurd evoked in Fear and Trembling and faith in the Absurd, or in the Absolute Paradox, as we find it the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The dialectical terminology of de Silentio’s Fragments was notably retaken by Johannes Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s most monumental philosophical work. As over against the Hegelian system which dialectically mediates Geist and Dasein, Kierkegaard proceeds to develop his existential project of the historical, outlined in the Fragments, in a dialectic of existence which intensifies the ontological abyss between the eternal and the temporal. Guden i Tiden, "the God in time," is for Kierkegaard the most paradoxical conception of the historical: the ultimate "contradiction of existence" is not the Eternal as coming into being but as coming into temporal existence with all the contingency and particularity implicated in the historical Incarnation. "God does not exist, he is eternal," writes Climacus in the Postscript, using the same category the Paradox which defined "the God" as the Unknown to human existence, in the Fragments. The central idea thus is not that of an essentia of God, but is rather that of the God coming into existence (Danish, Tilblivelse), the Eternal entering into the spatial-temporal existence of man: "The historical," writes Climacus, "is that the God, the Eternal, has come into existence at a particular time as an individual human being" [Det historiske er, at Guden, den Evige, er bleven til i et bestemt Tidsmoment som et enkelt Menneske].(CUP 178-183, 296, 527f.) This mimic-pathetic-dialectic composition, full of humor, satire and irony, besides ridiculing Hegel and his dialectic of mediation, seeks to provide the "historical costume" for the Kierkegaardian, project of man’s appropriation of truth, announced in the Fragments. This "historical costume" however is provided by "Christianity" alone. In the First Part of the Postscript, Climacus deals with the "objective problem, concerning the truth of Christianity, "under two main headings, "The Historical Point of View" and "The Speculative Point of View." In a word, Kierkegaard shows the impossibility of attaining an objective knowledge of Christianity’s truth (or untruth) by either approach, via the Scriptures or the Christian tradition, or via any speculative philosophy like Hegel’s. All one is left with is an agonistic, provisional conclusion, for Climacus goes so far as to affirm that "a logical system is possible, but an existential system is impossible."(CUP 101, 107) Thus in the Second Part, Kierkegaard emphasizes the ethical nature of truth, in that truth is given not in the "what" but in the "how" of the subject-object quest, therefore "truth is subjectivity":

In contrast to the Fragments’ anthropology, Climacus develops here a philosophy of man in which the eternal is already given as a man-inhabiting possibility, since faith is identified with truth, and thus Christianity’s offer of an "eternal happiness" constitutes his ultimate self-consciousness vis à vis the eternal qualifications of his existence. One detects here an anthropological return to the Socratic existence, in that one’s appropriation of the Truth requires an attitude of inward passion. Personal ethics, complicity with God, is therefore given in the anthropological becoming, which is expressed by Kierkegaard as "becoming subjective." As Gregor Malantschuk has pointed out, "this whole discussion must be understood as an attempt to understand the ontological both in its relation to the sphere of the human and to Christianity." One may recall en passant the early Heidegger’s understated appropriation of Kierkegaard’s conceptions of Angst, Ständigkeit (constancy) and Wiederholung (the latter indeed refers us back to the Diedrichs German edition of Repetition, which came out in 1909) in the analytic of Dasein’s finitude, beyond subjectivity and objectivity.

Even though I did not delve into an endless archaelogy of both Kant and Kierkegaard commentators, I have sought to emphasize the impact of the former’s "primacy of practical reason" upon the latter’s anti-idealist reappropriation of a transcendental anti-realism recast in an existential account of religion. Hence we may say that the relationship between morality and religion seems to allow for a reduction of the latter to the former in Kant, but by virtue of an analogous approach to dialectic and existence, in Kierkegaard, such a reductionism is simply out of question. Insofar as modernity has been held captive within its own dialectic of subjectivity, a resulting anthropologization of transcendence seems to undermine the very attempt to unmask foundationalist metaphysics. If Kant’s critique opens up the horizon of a practical metaphysics, Kierkegaard definitely denounces the inadequacies of both liberal and neo-orthodox theological revindications of the Kantian legacy. From a liberal standpoint, the problem of evil cannot be handled without recourse to a conception of a trans-ethical ontology or some metaphysical category that transcends the ethical. Neo-orthodox thinking faces a similar kind of difficulty as it tends to reduce religious language to an ethical interplay of coding and decoding. In order to better understand the philosophical development of the Kierkegaardian dialectic of existence, I should invoke here two works that had been published between the appearance of the Fragments and the Postscript: The Concept of Anxiety, by Vigilius Haufniensi (1844), and Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Sundry Persons, published by Hilarius Bookbinder (1845). It is in the second work that we find a key statement for understanding the Kierkegaardian philosophical anthropology, in the following words by Frater Taciturnus:

One notices here that, according to Kierkegaard, the ontological does not contain any concretion, it rather remains on the abstract level of comprehensive meaning, that is, it can signify either that something is or that it is not, without determining the concrete subject of thought. That is the reason why Kierkegaard prefers to use "existence" as a concrete-ontological expression for understanding human nature, whose being is existentially determined in the concretions of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. In the most important section of Stages, "Guilty/Not Guilty: A Passion Narrative," Quidam’s diary develops the existential movement which had been introduced in Either/Or with "the unhappiest man’s" complex of problems, yet unresolved in spite of Judge William’s attempts to tackle it in the second part of Either/Or. Those were the same ethical problems which the "young man," in Repetition, looked vainly for, a solution in the book of Job. Finally, in Fear and Trembling, Abraham did lose everything to win it back by faith, but he is still inadequate to save the unhappy individual from his "preexistent guilt." Thus Quidam’s diary appears to reproduce the double movement of the sinful individual towards a positive relation to the universal. As Kierkegaard avowed in the Papirer (1845),

As Kierkegaard admitted in the entry cited above, his dialectical project had to undergo "enormous detours" in order to attain the concretization of the religious stage. Quidam’s "story to suffering," for instance, reproducing his breaking off the engagement, shows the struggling individual before the transcendental as something external to him, before awakening to the ethical consciousness of God’s intervention (without resorting to any logical standpoint such as that of a theodicy, or a theology of creatio continuata). In an intriguing reading of Job’s example, Quidam writes:

In short, what Kierkegaard wants to stress in his "dialectic of the detour" is the indirectness of the Christian solution to the human problem. As the individual moves away from the negative (his ethical status of guilt) toward the religious ("the second immediacy"), this movement toward the individual’s "self-annihilation before God" remains however on the level of what Kierkegaard calls "Religiousness A."(CUP 493-8) In order to attain "the specifically Christian religiousness," Religiousness B, with its absurd claim about "God in time," the existing individual has to break "with the understanding, and with thinking, and with immanence": hence the indirect form of addressing those who are called to repentance. In the Religiousness A, the individual experiences a certain religious self-inwardness but this existential dialectic does not correspond to his ultimate ontological structure in that she dares to annihilate herself coram deo. It is thus only in Chisritianity, in its indirect revelation of a personal relationship between man and the paradoxical Eternal existing in the God-man that the individual can find her dialectical raison d’être. As Kierkegaard writes in the Journals, in 1848,

In The Concept of Dread (anxiety, angustiae, angoisse, Angst), the psychologist Vigilius Haufniensis depicts man as "a synthesis of the soulish and the bodily," united in a third factor, "the spirit." The spirit is related to itself and to its situation as dread, Angst. Angst is to be distinguished "from fear and similar concepts which refer to something definite, whereas dread is the reality of freedom as possibility anterior to possibility": dialectically speaking, Angst is "a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy." As an expression of freedom, anxiety is related to guilt and may take different forms as an expression of the original sin. It is only by "faith’s anticipation" that the individual can conquer anxiety in a qualitative leap of faith in the eternal. In fact, the category of the leap is a fundamental one in the Kierkegaadian dialectic between the quantitative (the objective) and the qualitative (the individual). As Malantschuk has remarked, "the extensive use of the category of the leap in The Concept of Dread points specifically to the individual’s participation in guilt." "In a decisive sense," he adds, "the qualitative leap appeals only in relation to Christianity." In his "anthropological contemplation," Vigilius Haufniensis concludes that the essential difference between man and the animal resides in the former’s destiny for eternity, in that man is a synthesis of eternity and temporality. In Either/Or Kierkegaard had already indicated what would be his religious anthropology of the eternal, according to which the self posits itself by choosing itself:

This same identification between selfhood and will, Kierkegaard relates to his anthropological dialectic of the infinite and the finite, the necessary and the possible, which is in fact an extension of the dialectic eternity-time. Such was indeed dealt with in The Sickness Unto Death, by Anti-Climacus, edited by Kierkegaard in l849, in which he develops a veritable "anatomy of melancholy." The book begins with an enigmatic enunciation of the anthropological problem:

Thus one may interpret Kierkegaard’s anthropology, as opposed to the "essentialism" of idealist philosophical anthropologies, as an existentialist psychology of a fragmented self, whose "existence is not only at variance with his ideal nature, but really its polar opposite."(SUD 20,30) By affirming that "despair is the sickness unto death," Kierkegaard persuades his teachers to recognize their sinful condition of death-bound beings and to discover their "having a self and an eternal self. " For "despair is sin", insofar as sin is defined as the disposition "in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself," sin is thus "the intensification of despair."(SUD 77) On the other hand, faith is paradoxically defined as "the opposite of despair" the dialectical abrogation (Ophævelse) of Angst: "in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it," namely, in God himself.(SUD 49) It is God himself in the "qualitative difference between God and man," that sets man qua sinner separated from Himself "by the most chasmal qualitative abyss." As Anti-Climacus says,

Because faith cannot be reduced to any form of knowledge, including the historical, Kierkegaard’s articulation of existence and dialectic leaves to the believer the pathos of giving birth to this indirect form of communication at the heart of subjectivity’s encounter with its other --the very other and every other that intersubjectively constitutes selfhood-- as faith operates a coming into existence, to believe what it does not see:

Faith is here taken first in its direct and ordinary sense [belief], as the relationship of the mind to the historical; but secondly, also in the eminent sense, the sense in which the word can be used only once...only in one relationship. From the eternal point of view, one does not have Faith that the God exists [eternally is], even if one assumes he does exist.(PF 108)

I should like to say, by way of conclusion, that Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence can be opposed to Kant’s transcendental anthropology, although it comes closer to it precisely as it seeks to avoid Hegel’s dialectical reconciliation of thought and existence, within the very tension it maintains between nature and freedom, knowledge and faith --a dualism which Kierkegaard deliberately reproduces in his refusal to naturalize the absolute paradox (eternal-temporality), very reminiscent of Kant’s own anti-realistic attempt to overcome the opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Stephen Evans has convincingly argued that in light of Kierkegaard’s ambiguous, twofold usage of the term "knowledge" it can be fairly shown that if one assumes, with the Danish thinker, that knowledge depends on subjectivity, then it makes sense to rub the lamp of freedom with passion and find God. The dialectic of existence thus oscillates between God’s "given" existence (such as in a realistic account of faith) and a proto-phenomenological construction of God (anti-realism) and this refers us back to Kant’s own refusal of naïve realism and idealism --recast by Husserl’s phenomenology. Since existence is not a concept (Begriff) one cannot learn the meaning of the word from one’s own particular existence, just as one doesn’t learn the meaning of "white" by seeing white objects --hence Kierkegaard’s anti-realism. Kierkegaard anticipates thus a refusal of classical foundationalism, referring us back to the debate among realists and anti-realists (as one finds, say, in John Rawls’s critique of moral intuitionism) and centered around "Kantian issues." Kierkegaard’s comments in Chapter III of the Postscript on Hegel’s supposed overcoming of Kant’s skepticism through the dialectical method --Hegel’s contention is that skepticism contains the seeds of its own destruction, i.e. doubt overcomes itself, like Descartes’(CUP 199)--that if there is objective propositional truth, how to live truly? As Evans argues, human existence mirrors human knowing, insofar as existence and knowing involve "reduplication", that is, they involve the actualization of conceived possibilities. It is this sense that one might go so far as to say that the pagan who believes in "false" gods is more authentic than the Christian who prays to the "true" God in a false spirit. As a dialectician of existence --a postmodern avant la lettre--, Kierkegaard resorts to "indirect communication" so as to keep the interplay of different strands of interpretation, as the principle of pseudonymity (assuming that the Kierkegaardian corpus be read as different authors and not as a single, unified author) attests to the contradictions unresolved in philosophical experimentalism. Kierkegaard’s "movement of infinity" brings thus forth a dialectical return to the temporal appropriation of faith, God’ s forgiveness of sin, as the existing individual embraces Christianity hic et nunc, and yet without succumbing to a happy-end trivialization of sorts. Such is the paradoxical "encounter" of the eternal with the temporal. Just like the Moment of the Incarnation, when the Eternal entered the temporal, Kierkegaard refers to the category of the Instant (Danish Ojeblikket, "a glance of the eye, eyeblink," German Augenblick) as the dialectical kernel of our existential consciousness:

Although I cannot examine here the Kierkegaardian conception of time, the dialectical articulation of time and existence, as can be seen, underlies his entire philosophy of existence, just as the opposition between "eternity" and "temporality": the instant, as "an atom of eternity," serves to restructure the whole synthesis of selfhood into a spiritual one, in man’s "ascent" toward its Other and the Unknown. In the last analysis, the Eternal transcends every synthesis between eternity and time, infinity and finiteness, preserving not only the Absolute Paradox in itself but above all the wholly otherness of God. It is only because of the Eternal, therefore, that humans can still hope to attain their ultimate vocation of becoming a Chistian. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love (1847),

As one sets out to reexamine Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence throughout his main writings --even in a quite synoptic analysis such as this--, one may be said to proceed from a "dialectical existence" toward an "existential anthropology," and then to an "existential dialectic." Besides the soundness of this jeu de mots (which remains very questionable, no doubt!), I intended to recast Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence as an anthropological movement beyond all metaphysical underpinnings. If Heidegger reinterpreted the Kantian critique and Western philosophy in order to retrieve a Fundamentalontologie, it was Kierkegaard who first "deconstructed" idealist philosophy in order to understand human historicity in its most primordial temporality, in a radical move against not being eternally destined and, at the same time, paradoxically choosing to project himself within, and out of the concrete flux of becoming, as an existing being (Tilværelse). The cunning aporia which translates so well the modern phenomena of "anthropologization" of the Transcendent in hermeneutical theology (e.g. Barth, Bultmann, Bloch, Tillich, Ebeling, Fuchs) and its philosophical counterpart of "detranscendentalizing" the Transcendental (e.g. the later Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Habermas) are not abscondita nor incognita in Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence: they are the very food for thought in his dialectical reflection. The "double movement" towards the religious transvaluation of the ethical, as we have seen, presupposes a "double-reflection" in which the existing individual herself moves and exists. For Kierkegaard, such an openess to the transcendent had to be found in the human ontological structure itself as an existing individual, a self. The existential category of subjectivity can be said to be correlate of both the instant and existence itself. As Robert Roberts has put it in his felicitous words,

"That individual" (hiin Enkelte), the fragmented, self-displaced author who addresses the individual reader seeks no followers: after all, the existing individual is itself opposed to the crowd. And yet, by way of its dialectic of existence, human life requires that the self, the paradoxically singular individual, come into being through her daily choices and be condemned to keep choosing so as to make this very existence of her own.

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